Pulmonologist

I guess I should have made a "Coughing" icon sometime in the last nearly-four months.

I saw the pulmonologist today, and we had a great chat. She looked at my breathing test results and my chest x-ray, then asked me a whole lot of questions that were far more thorough than anything the other docs have come up with.

So she says that she thinks my continuing cough is just a lingering post-viral thing, and she says she's been seeing a lot of people with it this year. She thinks it's probably being exacerbated by my normal allergies (which have been bugging me in a minor way for something like 20 years) and acid reflux (which has also been bugging me in a minor way for a long time). She thinks the tiredness/weakness is just due to the fact that my sleep has been disturbed by coughing (to various degrees) for almost 4 months in a row. That makes a tremendous amount of sense to me.

She also told me to immediately stop taking one of the medications the GP had prescribed (an asthma inhaler), because it can actually make you cough more. Plus, it was apparently a ridiculously high dose. I was a little ticked to hear all of that -- especially since it was a fairly expensive Rx that apparently should never have been prescribed in my situation -- but I'm hoping we're on the right track now.

The new approach is that I'm going to take various meds (mostly over-the-counter) to help with the allergies and acid-reflux, plus she's prescribing a cough suppressant with some codeine, so that I can actually sleep well at night until I'm feeling healthy again. Once I'm not coughing at all, she wants me to continue taking these for 2-4 weeks and then eliminate the meds one by one in an order she specified. It's nice to feel like someone knows what they're doing. I have high hopes for complete health within a month, and I'm hoping the cough suppressant will help me sleep better and restore my energy a lot sooner than that.

Comparative Fandoms and the Lizzie Bennet Diaries

I discovered yesterday that there is actually quite a bit of fanfic out there for "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries" (the web series I mentioned in at least one previous entry), which is extremely cool. I've been jonesing for more LBD pretty much since I discovered it, so this is a way to get my fix.

But I also discovered something interesting while perusing this plenitude of fanfic riches: the fans of LBD -- or, at least, the fans who write fic -- seem far more mature, intelligent, and literate than the fans in other fandoms I've been involved in. Their stories are, in almost all cases, grammatically correct, well structured, and well characterized. I pondered this briefly and decided that it must be because most people interested in "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries" are Jane Austen fans, and so they're women (and I do get the impression that most fans who write fanfic are women) who are fond of musty old books that are (1) full of long sentences containing often somewhat archaic vocabulary or unfamiliar cultural references, (2) composed largely of fairly subtle social plots, and (3) set in a rather stuffy time period in which societal expectations were quite different than those of today.

So I figure the majority of fans in this fandom are well-read, culturally sensitive, and fond of stories dependent on characterization and subtle social cues. They like words, and they appreciate the deft use of them. I don't think this was the case for the majority of Buffy fans, or Peter Pan fans, or Inu-Yasha fans. There were some great authors, of course, in each of those fandoms, and I loved them, but the majority of fics were full of spelling/grammatical/punctuation errors, ridiculously inappropriate characterization, and plots chock full of holes (when there were discernible plots at all). In those fandoms, the good fics were like gems that had to be searched for with great patience and effort. In the LBD fandom, about 8 out of 10 fics are so good that I actually bookmark them. It's refreshing!

It makes me want to write an LBD fic, but I haven't had much luck with writing fiction in the last few years. So I'm working on a fanvid, though I'm not sure if it will ever get posted, because the characters in the LBD sort of tend to sit still and talk to the camera, which doesn't make for a very exciting video. I'm looking for the more animated moments, but we shall see.

Style

Some months ago, I wrote about the fact that I am hesitant to compliment young folk on their clothes, hairstyles, or what-have-you, because I'm afraid they would find an old lady's admiration somewhat off-putting, like they must be doing something wrong if the elderly think their style is rockin'.

But today I was in the waiting room at the pulmonologist's office, and a woman who looked to be in her 60's fell in love with my green Converse high tops. She exclaimed over them and told me how great they were, with a big grin on her face. And I just thought, "Clearly, Converse transcends age." It made me very happy.

Comments

Today my mom and I went to the vet to get some cat food. As we were leaving, a tiny little old lady (easily 80 or 85) came in carrying her trembling poodle. My mom patted the dog and said how cute she was, and the little old lady said, "She's scared shitless!" I love when tiny old people swear. It makes my day.